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Yes, the world’s best hobo song is included here

Last night I swam a mile. I didn’t know how much I would do, but it started raining on me at about 800 yards and I didn’t want to get wet, so I just stayed in the pool. Before you know it, that’s 1,650 yards and my shoulders felt like it.

The getting wet joke is a lame family joke. We’d gone on a vacation, a dive trip, and my step-father and his kids had just been certified for open water diving. Now, some of us had been diving for a long time, and some of us took to water naturally, and a lot of us had learned from different companies and through evolving teaching methodologies. So I got to be the stick in the mud who demanded the safety meeting the night before our first dives.

Good thing, too, because we learned that my step-sister thought that giving the Heimlich maneuver was delivering CPR. (To be fair, she was young.) Anyway, she wanted to go to the pool, but I wanted to go over hand signals and hypothetical situations. It seemed a good idea. She hated every moment of it. Finally, after a refresher on rescue breathing, and a run through of the basic Caribbean fish signals, we decided we were all at least in the same chapter of the book. So it was time to hit the pool. But it was raining, you see, and so she wasn’t enthused by that. (She was young.) So the rest of us went to the pool. I stayed underwater so I would not get wet.

But last night, I swam that mile and then I floated in the water listening to the raindrops until I got cold. It was delightful in every way.

I swam a mile and I … liked … it?

I do not know what is happening.

Maybe I’ll go for another swim on Thursday.

My laps have been pretty decent, by my standards. My riding has been OK, but light. My running, lousy as ever. Now I just need to put them all in a consistent routine. That’s the part that always gets me.

Today, just more peaches. We tried the new blender. (It blends!) We had peach smoothies. And then we blanched peaches to freeze. Our freezer has a lot of peaches in it now. A new colleague came over and took some off our hands. I brought in three more baskets from the tree. I made myself another smoothie.

We goofed off in the pool until dinner time. It was a fine day. Just peachy.

So let us turn our attention to the Tuesday Tabs feature. This is for all of those extra browser windows I have open. Some of these are worth keeping, somewhere, but perhaps not worth a bookmark at this time. So I’m simply memorializing them here, so I can finally close a few more tabs. (There are so many tabs.)

This is a relatively new one, and I must say, not really, but I have to start somewhere. 10 Alternatives to bi-fold closet doors (you’ll absolutely love):

The most common alternatives to bi-fold closet doors include barn doors, sliding doors, pocket doors, French doors, and curtains. If you want a more unique option, consider swinging doors, a room divider, mirrors, bookcase doors, and industrial doors …

If you’re tired of the same old bi-fold doors, choosing an alternative comes down to the overall look you want. Ready to try something new? Give these different looks a chance when you’re ready to close the door to your closet.

My home office has a bifolding door set. Not a fan.

Here are some nice places to explore here. Maybe I’ll get to one or two this fall. 8 Adorable small towns in Delaware

“The First State” is an amazing state along the Atlantic Ocean, Delaware Bay and Delaware River. This peninsula location means it is full of beautiful sandy beaches, riverfront views and gorgeous parks. The state also has a rich history dating back to it being the first of the original 13 states to ratify the constitution in 1787 (hence its ‘first’ nickname). Among the big cities and prominent attractions are a number of adorable small towns full of charm, history, and opportunity. From the Dutch colony of Lewes to maritime villages or the scenic beaches of Bethany Beach, Delaware is a beautiful and friendly state worth exploring.

I wonder how long we’ll see stories like this, before they all feel inevitable, I mean. AI comes for YouTube’s thumbnail industry:

This March, when U.S.-based AI researcher Anand Ahuja launched CTRHero, “an AI to replace Thumbnail Artists,” he called it “his life’s work.” Trained on millions of successful thumbnails from various social media platforms, CTRHero could create thumbnails within minutes, reproducing faces with 99% accuracy, according to Ahuja. The tool outraged designers who felt their livelihoods were suddenly at stake: some threatened Ahuja with physical violence. Soon after its launch, Ahuja sold off the core technology for CTRHero.

…

For YouTubers, thumbnails are serious business, as they can make or break a videos’ reach. Top creators such as MrBeast test up to 20 different thumbnail variations on a single video, paying designers a reported $10,000 for a single video. This has spawned a microeconomy of freelance YouTube thumbnails artists around the world, who hone their design skills to attract clicks.

Stop me when it feels like everything is Ready Player One. How AI will turbocharge misinformation — and what we can do about it:

By some estimates, AI-generated content could soon account for 99% or more of all information on the internet, further straining already overwhelmed content moderation systems.

Dozens of “news sites” filled with machine generated content of dubious quality have already cropped up, with far more likely to follow — and some media sites are helping blur the lines.

Without sufficient care, generative AI systems can also recycle conspiracy theories and other misinformation found on the open web.

University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, an expert in the field, told Axios that generative AI will deepen the misinformation problem in three key ways.

Starbird is a brilliant scholar and one of the leading researchers in this field. Check out her work.

As you read this, I am eight CDs behind in the Re-Listening project. That’s the one where I’m listening to all of my CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. I am writing about them here because, it’s a good excuse to post videos of good music. Also, sometimes there are memories attached to these things, but mostly it’s padded content. And all of it’s fun. Except when you run across that bad CD, sorta like the bad grape you weren’t expecting. There’s one in every bunch, and it all comes down to taste.

Someone else bought Sister Hazel’s third studio album so I didn’t have to. I’m not sure who gave it to me, because I did not write it on the CD and it has been at least 23 years and two months since it happened. My memory is good, but there’s a lot of stuff in my memory, ya dig?

“Fortress” featured three singles, “Change Your Mind” peaked at number five on the US Adult 40. “Champagne High,” one of the album’s better songs, reached number 22. “Beautiful Thing” did not chart, which, in retrospect, was probably a signal that the moment of success brought on by Sister Hazel formula had somehow passed them by. It’s a mystery to me, really, because it’s the same as what we were all used to from the boys from Florida.

They are rhyming the word “thing” with the word “thing,” though. Maybe people noticed.

But, look, the formula works. If you want a fun sweaty party band, Sister Hazel can take the stage and keep you happy.

As an album, “Fortress” was a minor hit, settling at 63 on the Billboard 200. The record you remember, “Somewhere More Familiar” made it to 47 in 1997. Nine years and four albums later they cracked the top 50 again. Maybe tastes change around them, but the syrupy, twangy Southern rock guitar and the upbeat harmonies stayed with the band. And you can hear it still, Sister Hazel is touring all over the eastern US for the rest of the year.

Next up is one of those albums you regret. It was released in 1997 and I got it in 2000 and I can only blame myself. The world wide web was out there, and I had three solid years to find out “Deconstructed,” a remix album, is just a bad project. Even if you like electronic music, you didn’t want this. There are no new tracks, and no real reason to listen to this. I have probably played it four or five times, total, and two of those were for the Re-Listening project. Anyway, Bush worked with DJs from the electronic genre of music to remix some of the band’s previously released songs. The first one is probably the best track … but … still … electronic, British or of any other nationality, just wasn’t for me.

Hey, it was a fusion idea that went gold, and settled at number 36 on the Billboard 200 in 1997. I didn’t like it in 2000. I don’t like it today. I never understood it on my few tries in between. Maybe it’s just me. (It can’t be just me.)

Let’s wrap up this post with a better one. Up next in the Re-Listening project was a 2002 purchase, something I no doubt got at a discount bin. Something Sony licensed for a few suckers just like me. But that’s not a problem, because “The Sound Of Country was a 2 CD sampler set full of important tracks. It grabs you right away, with some classic Roy Acuff.

That’s the more famous Acuff version, of course, but his 1946 original is something to behold. It’s not o this CD, but I have included it for you here.

One of the greatest songs ever recorded in the English language is also included here.

It’s a fundamentally perfect song. Chet Atkins is in there. The background vocals are none other than the Jordanaires. That song topped the country chart for eight weeks in 1958 and climbed to number seven on the predecessor of the Billboard Hot 100. At least three covers of that song have charted over the years.

I am pretty sure I bought this double CD, which was, no doubt, very cheap, for this one song. It was the correct choice.

I was going through a Roger Miller phase. I’d find reasons to play that song. I wasn’t the only one who fell in love with that. It won five Grammys in 1966. It should have become a Broadway show and a network miniseries. If it had come out a few decades later it would have been embossed on mudflaps. The legendary Buddy Killen played guitar on that song. His people knew my people. Maybe that’s it.

You get into some important later hits, too. This topped the charts in 1984, presaging what would become of country music a generation later.

Also atop the charts in 1984, was The Kendalls last number one.

The father-daughter act released 16 albums, seeing 22 singles making the top 40, and 11 climbing into the top 10, including three at the top of the chart. Royce died in 1998 (this CD was published in 2002), but Jeannie Kendall, who started performing at 15, is still strong more than a half-century radio.

The whole double CD:

Blue Eyes Crying in The Rain – Roy Acuff
Walking After Midnight – Patsy Cline
Oh, Lonesome Me – Don Gibson
Mama Tried – Merle Haggard
King Of The Road – Roger Miller
Big Midnight Special – Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper
When I Stop Dreaming – Leona Williams
No Help Wanted – Bill Carlisle
Sweet Memories – Frank Ifield
It’s Only Make Believe – Conway Twitty
I Love You Because – Bob Luman
All My Ex’s Live In Texas – Whitey Shafer
Louisiana Man – Rusty & Doug Kershaw
Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind – Whitey Shafer
Okie From Muskogee – Merle Haggard
I Got Mexico – Eddy Raven
The First Few Days Of Love – Lorrie Morgan
Sweet Dreams – Don Gibson
Tennessee Waltz – Redd Stewart
Honky Tonk Merry Go Round – Patsy Cline
Night Train To Memphis – Roy Acuff
Tortrue – Kris Jensen
Thank God For The Radio – The Kendalls
God Bless The U.S.A. – Lee Greenwood

And with that, we’re only four CDs behind. The next installment of the Re-Listening project will feature an act that shows us what turn-of-the-century country and bluegrass music should have done.

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23
May 23

We play the song “Crazy Life” at the end of this post

I took this photo the other day, and I keep forgetting to publish it. That’s too bad, because it’s a great nod to the apparent lack of thoughtfulness of others. This is outside our building on campus, and these are handicapped parking spots, as you can see from the blue lines and the sign.

All of which makes this installment of Hoosier Hospitality amazing.

You can’t really move scooters unless you rent them, of course. The wheels are effectively seized to prevent free rides. So you have to muscle them around, which is what I had to do. But, on the off chance that anyone needed the space, at least someone was thinking about you.

I can say this about Hoosier Hospitality: it’s alliterative.

We haven’t run the tab feature in a few weeks, and my browser is groaning under the pressure. This is the place where I am memorializing pages that I might want to refer to again, but might not earn a bookmark.

The 25 best documentaries of all time, ranked:

The documentary genre is a more varied one than many people give it credit for. As a type of film, documentaries do usually aim to inform or educate about some kind of non-fiction story or topic, but that’s not their sole purpose. Some aim to evoke certain feelings or experiences more than anything else, others aim to present an argument or point of view in a persuasive manner, and others are mostly concerned with simply entertaining audiences the way a work of fiction might.

Furthermore, some documentaries aim to do a combination of the above, or maybe even none of the above, instead opting to do something else entirely. Exploring the world of documentary filmmaking can be a truly eye-opening thing to do, and reveal worlds or unique perspectives that aren’t as easy to explore through other genres.

James Brown’s historic concert, staged 24 hours after Martin Luther King’s assassination, is now restored and free to watch online. This show helped calm down Boston somewhat. It’s a legendary performance.

6 do’s and don’ts when buying used scuba gear:

Ok, so you’ve decided to buy your own scuba diving equipment. Whether you are newly certified or a seasoned diver, used scuba gear may seem like a great opportunity to save some money. Buying secondhand diving equipment can either be the greatest deal of your life or the biggest mistake, the difference is knowing what to look for.

We like to look out for you guys, so here are 6 tips to buy used scuba gear:

How solar farms took over the California desert: ‘An oasis has become a dead sea’:

Deep in the Mojave desert, about halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix, a sparkling blue sea shimmers on the horizon. Visible from the I-10 highway, amid the parched plains and sun-baked mountains, it is an improbable sight: a deep blue slick stretching for miles across the Chuckwalla Valley, forming an endless glistening mirror.

But something’s not quite right. Closer up, the water’s edge appears blocky and pixelated, with the look of a low-res computer rendering, while its surface is sculpted in orderly geometric ridges, like frozen waves.

“We had a guy pull in the other day towing a big boat,” says Don Sneddon, a local resident. “He asked us how to get to the launch ramp to the lake. I don’t think he realised he was looking at a lake of solar panels.”

We return to 1998 in the Re-Listening project. For the blissfully uninitiated, I am going through all of my CDs in the order in which I acquired them. It’s a stroll down a musical memory lane. It’s fun. And I’m writing and sharing some of it here. These are not reviews, because the web definitely doesn’t need another quarter-century-too-late alt band review. But they are a good excuse to post videos, pad out some content and have a little fun, which is kinda the point of most music.

This record is from 1997, but from what surrounds it in my old CD books I know I picked this up the next year. I imagine I got it from one of the two independent music stores that were in town at the time, but I don’t remember that part, here. This is one of the alt bands that personified the 1990s, and you can hear that immediately in the first track.

Toad the Wet Sprocket saw this record, their last for more than a dozen years, climb to number 16 on the Billboard 200, both on the strength of what had become a dedicated fan base, but also the single “Come Down,” which settled nicely in the top 40 in the U.S. and in the top 10 in Canada.

That song was so ubiquitous I was certain Toad was putting it on every record, and every musical coordinator had it in shows, movies, and commercials, but apparently not. I can only blame myself, and the A&R people at Columbia Records who had this on the air somewhere within ear shot every 17 minutes of my early 20s.

And here’s Glen Phillips doing “Throw It All Away” solo. I can never decide if this, or the full band, is the better version.

The answer, of course, is which ever you hear live.

The whole record is a fine continuation of Toad the Wet Sprocket’s work. The production is great, it’s hard to argue with the instrumentation. Glenn Phillips and Todd Nichols are in full throat. Everything works and there’s a little something for every mood. But I am always listening to Coil to get to track 11.

This is what I wrote when I finally, finally saw Toad the Wet Sprocket live last year.

I don’t know if “Crazy Life” was my first protest song or the first for my slice of my generation, but I’m pretty sure it was the first one I really noticed. The first one I read about. And I read a lot about Peltier. I’ve never really settled on how I felt about it, not really, but this is Wounded Knee.

The Eighth Circuit thought a jury would have acquitted him had information improperly withheld from the defense been available, yet the court denied a new trial. And if you really dive into the story it’s easy to question how the system was used. But I don’t know, not really. None less than Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama have campaigned for him, though, and that means something.

The point is, this song made me look it up, and think, and ask questions of things in general and specifically. And I probably shouldn’t like a pop song this much, but anything that scrapes your brain for a quarter of a century is worth noting.

And I love Todd Nichols’ sound.

Toad have released two records in the years since, 2013’s “New Constellation,” which was a crowd-funded album, and the Starting Now (2021). Some of their other work, and re-work, will show up later in the Re-Listening project. And like Chris Spencer says at the end of that 1997 video, you can catch them on tour this year, too. We did, twice, last summer, and I’m a little bummed I won’t get to see them this time out. But you can!

food / IU / links / music / Re-Listening / tabs / Tuesday / video — 1 Comment
11
Apr 23

Anybody have some chips? Or peanuts? Or a burrito?

I’m hungry. Quite hungry, really. I was just thinking, yesterday, that I am due a don’t-eat-much phase, but it seems I’m going the other way. This is a deep, can’t-ignore-it hunger. Lunch didn’t touch it. All the snacks stored away in my office? Not a dent. It is a considered-second-lunch-at-4 p.m. hunger. (Pizza sounded sooooo good.) I dared not to stand too close to anyone wearing a microphone in the studio this evening, lest my tummy start chiming in. After dinner, still hungry. I didn’t even have a big workout today. Makes me wonder how I’ll feel after a bike ride tomorrow morning.

I met a guy from Hearst Television today. The broadcasting giant sent two recruiters to campus to meet students. They did one-on-ones with interested students, I told him I could tell him to hire some of the young men and women he met, right away. They also did an under-attended info session, too.

Turns out the guy was from Savannah. I told him my wife and I got engaged there, and that we got married there. He knows the place. Everyone there knows the place. He lives just up the road, he said. He told me about the owner of the place where we got married. I told him we were just there in December, did the bridge run. Told him we go every year, that we don’t even do the tourist stuff anymore, but just walk around and enjoy the pace of things. I asked him if he had a job for me there. He asked me if I wanted to be a news director. The guy that was the news director in their Savannah shop just moved. I say, who doesn’t want to be a news director?

I wonder how many people he meets every year. How relentlessly positive he is, because he was profoundly optimistic, and energetic. Good traits, I’m sure, for this type of recruiting.

He left with my card. But, most importantly, he left having met a lot of talented students. A few of them might wind up within their company. They’ve got almost three dozen stations to fill, after all.

Let’s dive into the Tuesday feature, the Tuesday Close Your Tabs feature. I have so many open tabs this has become a regular thing. I’m not sure if we’re calling it that, or if we should. But it’s my site, so I can decide I guess … Anyway, here we are, the Tuesday Close Your Tabs feature. Yeah, we’re not going to call it that. Anyway, I have a lot of open tabs, and not everything should be closed, lost and forgotten forever. Better to memorialize a few of those pages here.

Anyway, I got sucked in, last month, by the title of this post. There’s always something Buddhism can show you, seems like. How to bear your loneliness: Grounding wisdom from the great Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön:

Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, or the sacred path of the warrior.

Same website, same general concept for me: of someone is writing about them, lichens and moss deserve at least a skim.Lichens and the meaning of life:

Lichens come alive as an enchanting miniature of the miraculous interconnectedness of nature in biologist David George Haskell’s altogether fascinating book The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (public library).

Having previously written beautifully about the interleaving of life, Haskell details the ecological and evolutionary splendor of lichens as living symbiotes:

The quietude and outer simplicity of the lichens hides the complexity of their inner lives. Lichens are amalgams of two creatures: a fungus and either an alga or a bacterium. The fungus spreads the strands of its body over the ground and provides a welcoming bed. The alga or bacterium nestles inside these strands and uses the sun’s energy to assemble sugar and other nutritious molecules. As in any marriage, both partners are changed by their union. The fungus body spreads out, turning itself into a structure similar to a tree leaf: a protective upper crust, a layer for the light-capturing algae, and tiny pores for breathing. The algal partner loses its cell wall, surrenders protection to the fungus, and gives up sexual activities in favor of faster but less genetically exciting self-cloning. Lichenous fungi can be grown in the lab without their partners, but these widows are malformed and sickly. Similarly, algae and bacteria from lichens can generally survive without their fungal partners, but only in a restricted range of habitats. By stripping off the bonds of individuality the lichens have produced a world-conquering union. They cover nearly ten percent of the land’s surface, especially in the treeless far north, where winter reigns for most of the year.

Having so mastered the art of unselfing, lichens emerge as living testaments to the visionary evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’s insistence that “we abide in a symbiotic world.”

Now that we’ve thunk deep thoughts, let us enjoy the idea of a delicious pie.No-bake Lemon Icebox Pie:

My Southern sweet tooth can never resist an icebox pie — a class of pie that earns its namesake from simply chilling the pie layers, so there’s no baking involved. They’re wildly simple to assemble, and lightly sweet with a crisp graham cracker crust and the most stately pile of whipped cream on top. With fillings, the flavors are endless, from strawberry to coconut to chocolate. Lemon ranks at the very top for me — fresh lemon zest and juice in this pie contribute to its natural lemony flavor, with no artificial colors or extracts required.

And now I’m hungry again. I’ve been hungry all day.

Maybe I should distract myself with a hyperbolic headline. A leak at the bottom of the sea may be a harbinger of doom/a>:

The team discovered the leak after spotting plumes of methane bubbles nearly a mile below the surface of the ocean. After sending an underwater drone to investigate, they discovered that water with a different chemical composition from the surrounding seawater was seeping into the ocean from a hole in the ground “like a firehose,” Evan Soloman, a fellow UW oceanographer and a co-author of the paper, said in a statement. “That’s something that I’ve never seen and to my knowledge has not been observed before.”

Further analysis found that the water was 16 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the seawater around it. The authors suspect that the fluid’s source is roughly 2 miles below the ocean floor at the CSZ fault line where temperatures sit around 300 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.

Why is that a big deal? The researchers say that the fluid might be acting as a kind of pressure regulator between the continental plate and the ocean plate. The more fluid that is in the cracks of the faults, the less pressure there is between the two plates as they smash into each other.

So less fluid means there’s more pressure building between the two plates. This can create a lot of stress on the region and a whole lot more potential energy that could unleash itself as a devastating earthquake.

I wonder if this is happening, in actuality, in other places and we just don’t know it yet.

Something we do know: how many tabs, 28, I still have open on my phone’s browser. That’s pretty decent progress. Still hungry, though.

With a quick dash of a video or two here, we’ll be caught up on the Re-Listening project. For just a moment. That’s the way it works. I’m listening to all of my old CDs, in the order that I got them, in the car and writing something about them here. I live just 4.5 miles from work, but it is a 20-some-minute commute, somehow. These CDs, then, come and go pretty quickly.

We’re in late 1998 here, with a by-design one-hit wonder. New Radicals released this one record, fronted by the high-toned Gregg Alexander, but Alexander and his writing partner, Danielle Brisebois, ended the project before the second single was released. The album ” Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too” was topical, critical, and pulled from all sorts of influences to make a modern pop record. The record made it to 41 in the US, and landed in the top 20 on charts in Austria, Canada, and the UK. You might remember the top 40 hit single.

That’s an artist’s song.

In the liner notes to her 2004 compilation Artist’s Choice, the Canadian songwriter Joni Mitchell praised “You Get What You Give” for “rising from the swamp of ‘McMusic’ like a flower of hope”. In 2006, Ice-T was asked on Late Night with Conan O’Brien about what he has heard, besides rap music, in the last few years that really grabbed him and his only reply was “You Get What You Give”. In a Time interview, U2 lead guitarist the Edge is quoted saying “You Get What You Give” is the song he is “most jealous of. I really would love to have written that.”

I always liked the album, but it’s starting to show it’s age.

The first track has, has always had, a terrific energy. And when it came on — even though I am playing all of these discs in order I’m not always sure which one is going to appear next — I was quite excited for the rest.

A bit later, this one isn’t bad. The bit about obscure bands is hale, hilarious, hipster:

The rest … today it just feels like it’s trying to find it’s voice, while trying to be a meta-album, while trying to channel Prince and, among others, Hall & Oates. The 1970s came back in 1997, basically.

New Radicals signed in 1997 and called it in the spring of 1999. Alexander went back to producing. Seems the touring was part of the problem. They went platinum along the way, though.

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4
Apr 23

There’s a nice, easy recipe here — goes well with jazz

I attacked the morning with zeal. Zeal, I say. That was what the morning was attacked with, zeal. And urgency, and enthusiasm. The first alarm went off and I got up and put on the bike riding clothes and I went downstairs and rode on Zwift for 96 minutes, putting 36 more miles under my shoes.

One of the routes I did today included Neokyo All-Nighter, the fever dream of some poor game designer. What even is that thing floating in front of me?

The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 95 routes down, 34 to go.

Later in the morning, I found myself reading copy aloud so a student could master the teleprompter. My voice was still thin in that way that’s difficult to control after a big workout. The was just coming from the back of my throat. There was no projection, no commanding news voice, no soothing tones, just a bleating, busted reed of a sound. Didn’t sound like me at all, especially to me. Even though I know it happens with a big workout, and in an hour or two I’ll sound more like myself, it’s always a tiny bit unnerving. What if it takes too long? What if this is the way I sound now?

But it was only a practice, for someone else. For some reason it got a polite bit of applause.

“Huzzah! He’s literate!”

That happened to me in a newsroom once, too. New job, second day there. The news director was the anchor, he pitched to me for my first story and I glanced over at him just in time to see a wide-eyed, stunned look on his face. “He can do that?”

And I thought, If you’re surprised, why did you hire me?

I googled this tonight, why my voice does that, not the former news director. (He’s in sales now.) It apparently has something to do with exertion and the way the muscles get used. But people seem to have different responses to this. Some people’s voices get deeper after a big workout, for example. This was a medium workout for me, though, and when I found that different people have different reactions, I knew it was time to close the tab.

Speaking of which …

While I closed that one to avoid diagnosing myself via Dr. Duck Duck Go, I am closing these tabs because … I don’t need this many open browsers in my life. The information could be useful, so I’m keeping the notes here for me, and sharing them with you, just in case.

I did an overdue phone upgrade late last year and, surely, there’s something useful to do with the old one. 10 ways to reuse your old iPhone in 2023:

Recently upgrade to a newer iPhone? We bet you have your old one stuffed in a drawer left to gather dust because you can’t figure out what to do with your old iPhone. But, lucky for you, we’ve got some fantastic ideas to reuse your old iPhone.

It is sitting on my desk, waiting.

I wanted a light and bright pasta one night the last time I had a bachelor weekend. I started pulling things out of the cabinet and then though, No, I’m hungry, not feeling experimental … and found this recipe, which was almost exactly what I was imagining. Light & easy garlic lemon pasta for two:

Ingredients
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 1/2 tablespoon olive oil
juice of 1 lemon
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
handful of fresh basil leaves, chopped
enough cooked angel hair pasta for 2
salt & pepper, to taste

I ate that two nights in a row.

This came up right after the first balloon craze last month. When China shot down five U-2 spy planes at the height of the Cold War:

The U-2 has a long and storied history when it comes to espionage battles between the US and China. In the 1960s and 1970s, at least five of them were shot down while on surveillance missions over China.

Those losses haven’t been as widely reported as might be expected — and for good reason. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was responsible for all of America’s U-2s at the time the planes were shot down, has never officially explained what they were doing there.

Adding to the mystery was that the planes were being flown not by US pilots nor under a US flag, but by pilots from Taiwan who, in a striking parallel to today’s balloon saga, claimed to be involved in a weather research initiative.

And, after closing these three, I am down to just 34 tabs on my phone.

I am still catching up on the Re-Listening project — playing all of my CDs, in order, in the car. These aren’t reviews, but mostly just an excuse to share good music and write about whatever comes to mind about it, the time, or whatnot. And right now we are somewhere in early 1998, I think, when I was adding a bit of jazz to the collection. Most assuredly I was trying to bring some class to my collection.

So today we’re listening to Charles Fambrough’s 1992 The Charmer. This is the second album from the late, great bassist and composer. This still plays as a great easy jazz listen.

I don’t have the education or jazz vocabulary to appreciate the composition — or the talented interplay between the musicians — as I should, but reading comments online I have come to understand it was apparently under-appreciated in it’s time.

To me, this is perfect for ambience — say you’re making a nice lemon pasta — or as something quiet in the office, or simple and unobstrusive for the car. Which sells Fambrough short. He appears as a contributor on 17 other records, plus releasing nine records of his own between 1991 and 2003. He died, at just 60, in 2011. One of his obituaries called this record the high point of the CTI label’s 1990s output. It also used two exclamation points and the word “splendiferously” in the same paragraph. This was, one presumes, written by someone with a much better sense of musical appreciation than I have.

And so, for your musical appreciation, here is the complete Charles Fambrough album, The Charmer.

I attacked the deal with zeal; I will end the evening with the jazz.

adventures / history / links / photo / weekend — Comments Off
12
Mar 23

Inside Sagrada Familia

There are a few things you should know before we step inside one of Spain’s most important cultural icons, and one of her most popular attractions. In no particular order …

As I said, I didn’t care for the aesthetic of the exterior of Sagrada Familia. It just doesn’t appeal to me. Secondly, I am probably not a talented enough photographer, and I certainly didn’t have the proper equipment with me, to capture the incredible beauty of the interior.

I say that because, in my humble and awe-inspired opinion, this was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever stood, including some of the best places of worship in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Istanbul, New York and elsewhere.

Third, all of the liberally quoted text that follows about Antoni Gaudí’s masterwork, is from this page.

Finally, if we ever have the opportunity to visit Barcelona again, we’re blocking off a sunny day, just to sit inside this place to watch the light change. You’ll see why, just as soon as we go through the Door of the Portal of Faith.

I previously mentioned the long-running construction.

“The date of completion of the Sagrada Familia has been postponed many times. It is one of the longest architectural projects in the world and if the finish date is met, construction will have taken 147 years. This is surprising if we consider that we are in the 21st century. In this article we are going to understand why the work has taken so long and why now they are moving at a good pace.

“The year 2026 will mark the centenary year of the death of Gaudí and we want to celebrate this anniversary by completing the Sagrada Familia. However, there are two things which won’t be finished by 2026: the artistic part and the surroundings of the Basilica.”

“Finishing the Sagrada Familia is a long and complicated task. The reasons for the delay in the finalization of the project are its complicated architecture and historical changes such as the death of Gaudí, the Spanish Civil War, the destruction of the original project and the limited economic support from private donations that have subsidized it.

“The photo collage shows the evolution of the work over the years.”

I’m not the sort to pick on these things myself, but if you listen to the audio tour, there is some discussion of the columns, which are both artistic and structural. They, like so much of Gaudí’s work, are meant to be evocative of nature. Trees, in this case. And once you realize that — the shape, the shade of the selected stones, the way the branches fly into the ceiling — you can’t unsee it. As … you’ll see …

The windows facing the west are the reds, oranges and yellows. The ones to the east are in cooler blues and greens. And this sets the mood of the entire place.

We were there in the middle of the afternoon, at a time of day when you’re struck by how much of this enormous space is filled with natural light.

“(A)narchists set fire to part of the Sagrada Familia at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, including the workshop where Gaudí had always worked.

“In Gaudí’s workshop there was not a large library and the graphic material was reduced to a minimum. There was a photographic workshop, a space for sculptures, a large area for plaster models (scale 1:10 or 1:25) and a large number of models to investigate aspects of lighting, functionality, construction and structure.

“Many of the sketches, drawings and models by the great architect disappeared and a lot of information on how to continue the work was lost. In 1936 they tried to preserve the remains of the destruction by sandwiching the pieces, and that is how they survived the conflict, hidden between two walls.

“The Civil War caused the paralysis of the works for 17 years (1935 – 1952). It was not until 1976 that the four towers of the Passion façade were finished, where Josep Maria Subirachs added his sculptural work which begun in 1988.

“The Sagrada Familia is an expiatory temple which means that it is financed only by selfless donations from the loyal supporters and by the tickets of the tourists who visit it.”

See those trees yet?

So there’s interpreting the architect’s intent, following what survived of his plans, and continuing on, but also those budget problems. What’s before us, then, is even more breathtaking considering these circumstances.

“Three generations of architects have dedicated themselves to recomposing the more than 1,000 pieces of model left over from the fire of Gaudí’s studio in 1936. But Gaudí’s work was so avant-garde, that architects could not easily reconstruct their designs.

“The forms that make up the building are so complex that five different computer programs have had to be combined to reconstruct the surfaces outlined by Gaudí. These programs are used in the automotive and aeronautical industry. This is without a doubt an important factor in the completion of the Sagrada Familia.

“Gaudí transformed his plans into large scale models because he wanted to see the three dimensions.”

If you stand right in the center, and look up, this is the ceiling, the underside of Gaudí’s magesterial canopy.

“Since 2000, his model has been continued thanks to the use of 3D printers. These allow us to manufacture the gypsum models originally designed by Gaudí. It is indisputable that 3D vision has helped guide decisions about the design and structural behaviour of the project.

“Since the end of 2016, the technology offered by virtual reality glasses has been used to carry out three-dimensional simulations. This technology allows us to reduce the work times in projection.”

New building techniques are also speeding up actual construction, particularly as it applies to the towers, of which you’ll count 18 when the building’s work is done.

Remember, I began this post saying I’m not a talented enough photographer to share this with you. I mentioned the changing light. Both of these are proven in the last two shots, taken from almost the same spot, just a few moments apart.

Yes, I would spend a day in here, watching the wonder of the wandering light dancing through Gaudí’s inspired work.

“The straight line belongs to Man; the curved line belongs to God,” Gaudi said. The man knew some stuff.

Up next: A quick trip into one of Sagrada Familia’s towers.